The Impossible Dream (Romans 4:13-25)

Time comes for us all. I guess. My main group of parasocial internet friends are a cohort of video games journalists. Many of them are exactly the same age that I am or a little bit older, and I’ve followed them on their podcasts and Twitter feeds for more than ten years. As I have moved from my mid-20s to, as I am often reminded, pushing 40, so have they. I’ve listened to these folks talk into microphones for hours a week for at least a decade. In more recent years, I’ve heard something disquieting radiate from them – encroaching middle age. Some of it has a positive bent. We all know how to do life and work better. We understand how the world works and how to take care of ourselves. I now own a pair of slippers, have realized the importance of moisturizing, and carry glasses clear. Some of it, I recognize as inevitable. Our physical forms need more regular maintenance than in previous eras. For me, a lifetime of accumulated injuries and neglect has developed the tendency to catch up with me, and fighting back against a Dad-Bod only gets harder.

 However, some of it truly bothers me. I hear a growing sense that life has reached its final homeostasis. Whatever essential shape that life holds now will be what it will be for the long haul. For those with a positive outlook on their lives, it can be welcomed with a joyful, “Well, I guess life will just be like this.” For those less happy with their lot, it can be welcomed with a begrudging, “Well, I guess life will just be like this.” Either way, at some point, the world and our lives lost their sense of infinite possibility. Instead, the time has arrived to scale back one’s dreams and settle. Little chance for drastic improvement remains.

I get that instinct. For a lot of my 30s, I felt trapped in a life that increasingly felt like not mine. I had spent my 20s on an adventure and had entered my 30s with a real sense of what I wanted to do with the next seasons of my life. I felt called to urban spaces and urban ministry. I had built up a skill set for multicultural work and a passion for navigating the challenges that city life brings for a lot of folks. On top of that, the more fun side of cities call to me as well. Museums, restaurants, and exploring endless variety form important parts of my selfcare, as does living near people that I love. By the age of 34, the realization that my life contained little of any of that came crashing down upon me. I had spent the bulk of my professional life living and serving in a variety of tiny to small towns and had only moved further from anything resembling urban life, multiculturalism, or urban challenges. As the inevitable march of time sped up, I began to fear that I had become trapped in a long term and degrading homeostasis far from anything that I dreamed life would be.

This journey gave me new appreciation for Paul’s perspective on Abraham. In Romans, Paul seeks to write a coherent work of the theology that unites the Testaments, that God didn’t tell one story in the Old Testament and now has a different story in light of Christ. Instead, the story of God and God’s people flow smoothly from one stage of the plan to the next stage of the plan. As part of this, Paul proposes Abraham as an archetype for being justified by faith. Abraham had unwavering faith in God, and that aspect sets him apart. “No distrust made him waver concerning the promise of God, but he grew strong in his faith as he gave glory to God, being fully convinced that God was able to do what he had promised. Therefore his faith ‘was reckoned to him as righteousness.’” (Romans 4:20-22 NRSV) Just as we get counted as righteous because of our faith in Christ, so too with Abraham, he had a faith in God and that, not law, reckoned him as righteous.

More specifically, Abraham had faith that something absolutely impossible would occur. God told him that he would be the father of many nations. For anyone, that sounds like quite a lofty promise, but the age of Abraham and Abraham’s spouse, Sarah, made that a biologic impossibility. As Paul puts it, “He did not weaken in faith when he considered his own body, which was already as good as dead (for he was about a hundred years old), or when he considered the barrenness of Sarah’s womb.” (Romans 4:19 NRSV) A pair of childless, near as makes no difference, centenarians do not bring worth great nations. They come to terms with dying childless and find other ways to find fulfillment. They settle because life has permanently closed a door. Yet, when God makes Abraham and Sarah an utterly impossible promise, Abraham gets reckoned as righteous because he believes in the impossible. Somehow, in ten decades of life, Abraham had not lost the ability to imagine more, to believe that God can bring drastic improvement, to continue to seek the impossible dream.

I aspire to that. I did get my life back, but in the intervening years between realization and the actual opportunity, I essentially lost faith that such a change could happen. From my perspective, it took so long and involved so many disappointments that even the relatively simple changes of job and location felt like an impossible dream. I lost the ability to see the possibility of improvement and feared that I’d have to settle for disappointment. I didn’t have to, though. My life got drastically better, even as I push 40.

Paul’s point about Abraham rings true for me. Abraham and Sarah aren’t just evidence that God can do anything. They serve as a testimony for us to believe that God can do anything. Faith innately involves a belief in the impossible, not just a recognition of the existence of a divine being. It’s a confidence, at any age, that when God says that God can do impossible things like change your life, make you whole again, and fix ills of the world, God can and will.